Meixiang's Bad Day
by roisaber
Summary: Belltower Sergeant Meixiang always gets stuck with cleaning up the mess. Unfortunately, things go from bad to worse when she's assigned to bring in international hacker extraordinaire, Arie van Bruggen.


Belltower Sergeant Meixiang was having a bad day. She woke up in the predawn hours to finish paperwork left over from the recent unpleasantness at The Hive, and right when she was done, she had just enough time to _think_ about getting a cup of coffee before a priority call came in from Upstairs.

"Sergeant, I want you to take a squad and go to Hengsha Court Gardens. There's a dangerous hacker _gweilo_ named Arie van Bruggen renting an apartment on the upper floor, room 806. Arrest him and bring him in for interrogation. He is to be considered armed and extremely dangerous."

Meixiang sighed. Getting perforated by some crazy foreigner wasn't high on her list of aspirations for the day, but Belltower did pay her salary after all. She had a nice little apartment in a new building on the west side of the city. Though she hated Hengsha, her application for a transfer to Hong Kong had been in the system for two months now and she was bound to get an answer soon. She had a few friends in the department, went out for drinks a couple times a week, and occasionally let herself get talked into bed by a particularly charming civilian. All in all, it was a decent life.

Apart from all the Belltower crap, anyway.

"Cào!" she said to herself.

"Got it, Lieutenant," is what she said out loud

And that was that. Belltower attended the "don't ask, don't tell" school of mission planning; orders came down from On High and the brass didn't much care how shit got done, just so long as it did. Meixiang was more… restrained than some of the other Sergeants, and as such, they tended to stick her with the most volatile missions. As usual, the reward for getting things done was more work. Meixiang quickly scanned a duty roster on her tablet computer screen. She picked twenty reliable offic – that is, _associates_ – and sent them orders to meet her in the briefing room. She also downloaded a blueprint of HengshaCourtGardens from the city development agency, and a psychological profile of van Bruggen done up by one of the mind minders downstairs. Finally, she gave the armory the heads up that she was going to need some guns, armor, and a personnel carrier.

"Back in the traces, eh?" an acquaintance asked her as she made her way through the facility's fortified corridors.

"I need a vacation," she groaned in response.

Heng only laughed.

All the people she called in arrived in the conference room with clockwork punctuality. Belltower ran a tight ship, and even the smallest of infractions could result in a wage dock, or worse. Meixiang's nose itched. She ignored it while everyone watched and waited for her to begin the mission briefing.

"Our target is a wanted hacker named Arie van Bruggen," she explained. "He's got an apartment on the top floor of the HengshaCourtGardens."

She hit a button on her handheld, and a large screen flared to life behind her showing a schematic of the eighth storey of the building.

"As you can see, it's a luxury condominium complex. The residents aren't going to be happy to see us, but ignore them and focus solely on van Bruggen. I want Feng, Yun, Jiangou, Niu, and Shan to patrol the courtyard and the street entrance. I don't want anyone getting into or out of the building for the duration of the mission. I don't care if some suited up salaryman complains; I mean _nobody_. You and you," here she pointed at two associates that were new to her, "I want you to take up sniping positions on the roof. We can't let him get away, no matter what."

One of the pair grunted. He didn't appreciate taking orders from a woman. Meixiang ignored him and thought out loud.

"I want two of you to patrol the building's foyer and the rest with me so we can secure the eighth floor and van Bruggen's apartment. We're moving on him with overwhelming force so he'd better not get away. Are there any questions?"

Yun raised his hand. "What about a bomb squad? What if van Bruggen has his apartment booby trapped?"

"His psychological profile suggests that's unlikely," Meixiang answered. "He's a computer hacker, not an engineer. Furthermore it's obvious that he's not interested in dying just yet. He'll come with us without a fight if we can catch him off guard."

That seemed to conclude the briefing, so Meixiang led them all down to the armory, hurrying them along as necessary. Now that the mission against van Bruggen was in their computer systems it was only a matter of time before he was alerted. Meixiang didn't know how extensively their computer security had been penetrated, but there was little doubt that a man with van Bruggen's rather impressive credentials must at least have feelers somewhere in Belltower's mainframe. Of course, the Brass were too stubborn to try doing things the old fashioned way – with pens and paper, which would neutralize much of his ability to pick up on their move against him. Well, she had her own job to worry about.

It was the work of half an hour to get everyone armed, armored, and inside the APC. Meixiang inwardly cursed the delay. Every minute that went by was another minute some latent worm in the Belltower's computers might go off and pick up that the name "van Bruggen" was suddenly an item of active interest. The APC bounced along the city streets, occasionally honking to drive scurrying pedestrians out of the way. They finally made it to HengshaCourtGardens, and with a bark of "Go!" Meixiang drove them all out of the vehicle and on to their assigned stations. She rapidly scaled the stairs leading into the foyer of the apartment complex, and then hailed the elevator.

Meixiang waited.

"Geeze, where is that thing?" one of the associates, Ping, muttered. "It's like a video game loading screen or something."

Finally the elevator dinged open and Meixiang stepped aboard with the other officers assigned to the eighth storey. When they arrived, she left three of them behind to patrol the floor and took up positions with two others on either side of van Bruggen's apartment door. She held up her hand and counted off – three, two, one, _go_. With an involuntary battle cry she immediately regretted, Meixiang kicked in van Bruggen's door.

There was the sound of an explosion and Meixiang was left briefly stunned. She realized she'd squeezed her eyes shut and she opened them tentatively, fearing that she might discover some as-yet unperceived injury. Now that she could see, she noticed a hole blown in the far wall of the apartment and swore. True to his profile, van Bruggen hadn't set his whole apartment up to explode. Just his secret computer room in an unmarked closet. Meixiang's ears rang mercilessly.

"Sergeant, you okay!?" Ping shouted.

"Yeah! Let's see what we can find in here," she answered back, cursing her own incompetence.

Upstairs was not going to be happy about the ruined evidence.

A quick search of the apartment didn't turn up much of interest. It was obvious that van Bruggen did live here; there were clothes strewn on the bathroom floor, along with geeky accoutrements like a binary clock sitting on his nightstand. Meixiang didn't know where he got his money but it was easy enough to guess - the man was a fearsome hacker and internationally wanted criminal, and many organized crime bosses or even legitimate corporations might pay good money to sabotage or spy on their competition. She pursed her lips and took out her pocket computer. She called her team downstairs.

"Hey, Yun, did anybody try to leave the building?" Meixiang asked, hoping against hope that van Bruggen might not have had enough time to escape.

To her surprise, nobody answered. Typical; in her experience, electronics always failed at the worst possible times. Strange, though, she had full GX8 band service according to the bandwidth icon.

"Yun?"

Still nothing.

"Motherfucker," Meixiang announced in English to no one in particular.

Ping observed, "You've been watching too many American movies."

Meixiang walked over to the window and looked out. Even from eight stories up, something seemed amiss, but she couldn't quite put her finger on what it was. The acrid smell of burning plastic filled the air of the apartment and made her nose wrinkle.

Suddenly, something incredibly strong reached around her neck and started choking her. Stunned, she tried to force off her attacker's arm, but it must have been a prosthetic or something. She'd never encountered someone so strong before. Meixiang fell into a deep darkness.


End file.
